Outbrain won’t name specific sites that were kicked out of the network. Instead, it pointed to its new guidelines, which include prohibiting content that has “inaccurate or misleading headlines;” “promotes businesses that appear to be generally deceptive or misleading; or “encourages high-risk investments or money-making schemes with the intention of profiting off user participation in such practices.”

Color me impressed. Instead of the pure pursuit of growth at all costs Outbrain seems to understand that delivering quality content and clicks across their network is what will translate into long-term success.

He calls Origami’s proposition “Splunk for marketers,” referring to the service that offers analytics to monitor enterprise apps, and he believes that this will be something that will become even more commonplace in the world of big data.

I’m a fan of Splunk so this description certainly catches my eye. The site itself also seems heavy on the visual presentation of big data. Will the winner of the big data race be the one who best channels Edward Tufte?

“DataSift is at the intersection of two huge trends: social and Big Data. The company has built a real time data platform that allows customers to sift through billions of tweets, posts and internal corporate data to find just the insight they need for their business, while the easy to use query tool means anyone can access the data directly”, said Rory O’Driscoll Managing Director Scale Venture Partners.

DataSift is attacking the big data issue from the social side first. That’s not a bad idea since there’s such a huge amount of data and anecdotal sampling might not provide the right insight.

A startup called Continuuity, which raised $10 million today, has struck a chord with developers who are struggling to build big data apps on top of Hadoop. Continuuity promises to make it easier by offering a suite of tools that extend across the various stages of software development from “prototype to production.”

Continuunity is yet another big data play but one aimed at allowing developers to build big data apps. While I think the true app market is likely to dry up soon, I think Continuunity could be an important part of the ecosystem or be snapped up by another company in the space.

We want to help more businesses provide great content on Pinterest and make it easy to pin from their websites. Today, we’re taking a first step toward that goal with some free tools and resources.

So Pinterest finally creates business accounts, waiting until they were on the other side of the hype cycle. That may or may not have been smart. However, I’m not thrilled with the terms of service nor the stilted language in this post. For such a ‘warm fuzzy’ brand it seems … off.

You can email a Tweet to anyone, whether they use Twitter or not, right from your Twitter stream or from the details view of any Tweet. Just click on the “More” icon next to the reply, retweet and favorite buttons in order to email a Tweet to anyone you know. You can add your own comment, and we’ll send an email with your comment and the Tweet together. Just like that.

This is a brilliant way to expose more people to content (i.e. – improve advertising reach) and introduce more people into using Twitter. In some ways I’m surprised it took them this long to implement this feature.

You can also see media instantly in your search results stream on iPhone and Android. Photos and article summaries automatically show previews to give you a bird’s eye view on what’s happening.

Twitter cards open by default! Who could have predicted that? #thisguy #justsayin In all seriousness, this shows how important mobile and the visual experience are to Twitter as they finally come out of their chrysalis.

Over the past two years, the company has made major strides into more traditional forms of mainstream media turf, making hashtags and its little bird logo a now-ubiquitous part of watching or promoting TV shows and films.

But more than that, Twitter’s ever-expanding sales and monetization teams want a larger slice of the ad dollars — and the eyeballs — that big media companies bring to the table.

This has since been confirmed and Peter Chernin has joined Twitter’s board. But Mike Isaac is absolutely right in his assessment. The real question for me is whether Twitter can retain the de factor ownership of the hashtag.

About The Author

AJ Kohn is Owner of Blind Five Year Old, a San Francisco Internet Marketing firm specializing in search. An experienced marketing executive with a successful track record spanning 20 years, AJ combines a deep understanding of search marketing with a passion for product strategy and iterative product development, fusing design and user experience with quantitative analysis.